[1] In the place referred to, Contrat Social, Bk. I. chs. iii., iv., Rousseau points out clearly that force gives no right. So when Hegel describes him as saying that the right of rule rested on force, etc., in its historical aspect, this is incorrect unless it means that, this “historical” aspect giving no explanation of right, the term “right” is a mere name so far as it is concerned.
[2] Cont. Social, Bk. I., iv.
[3] I retain Hegel’s paraphrastic rendering of Rousseau’s words.
[4] Cont. Social, Bk. I., iv., cf. p. 89 above.
[5] Hegel’s italics.
[6] Anything is “in and for itself” when it has become “for itself,” i.e. consciously and explicitly what it is “in itself,” i.e. in its latent or potential nature.
[7] Rousseau’s Will of All.
[8] i.e. Anything is free, in as far as it is able to be itself. Thought, as the embodiment of the return upon oneself or being with oneself, is for Hegel the strongest case of this.
[9] i.e. By going beyond it.
[10] I.e. Philosophy, by basing itself on the idea of freedom, is led to scrutinise the life in which mind realises itself, before it becomes, and on the way to becoming, reflectively philosophical; and which is therefore “its own freedom”—as one texture with knowledge—and also a “concrete content,” i.e. an actual system of living, as an object in which mind can find itself expressed—a relation which = freedom.